Debian Weekly News - September 3rd, 2002

Welcome to this year's 34th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. Good news is coming from Venezuela, since Linux Today reports that all software developed for the government must be
licensed under the GNU GPL.

OpenOffice.org uploaded to Unstable. Chris Halls recently
announced that Rene Engelhard has finally uploaded OpenOffice.org 1.0.1-5
to unstable/contrib. The packages contain a large set of help documents and
internationalization files for 18 languages. However, since the package is
new to the Debian archive, it will take a while before the files appear in the
public archive. Chris Halls also announced translated help
files.

Revising old ITP Reports. Bas Zoetekouw announced
that he is going to move very old ITP bugs (Intent to Package) into RFP bugs
(Request for Packaging). He only plans this for reports that are one year old
or even older. For such old intents it is unlikely that the original reporter
is still working on these packages. However, some of them were already
uploaded very recently and will be excluded.

Security Notification Script. Rob Bradford announced a
script
that compares locally installed packages with those on security.debian.org. Furthermore it
provides a description of the problem and the name of the Debian advisory if
the package is mentioned in the DSA RDF
file. The Resource Description
Framework is used as an information interchange format for various things.

Wearable Debian. We have been notified that Debian is used at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) for a research platform for wearable computers. The goal of the MIThril project is the
development and prototyping of new techniques of human-computer interaction
for body-worn applications. The systems running Debian are based on a StrongARM
processor.

The Debian Bug-Fixing Game. Andrew Suffield wondered
whether turning bug-fixing into a game would help Debian reduce the list of
open bugs. This could be a counterbalance to the huge quantities of time
which moon-buggy and frozen-bubble have taken away from Debian development.
Andres Salomon warned
that this could change the goal people have to changes from fixing bugs to
simply closing them. Here's a summary from an
associated IRC discussion.

No uncompressed Packages Files anymore. Anthony Towns announced that in a couple of days time uncompressed Packages files for unstable
will cease to be generated, and bzip2'ed Packages files will be generated in
their place. Similarly, the Contents-*.gz files for unstable will probably be
switching to .bz2 in the not too distant future. Adam Heath pointed out
that this is likely to break apt-get when using file uris.

Automatic Bug Closing revised. Gerfried 'Alfie' Fuchs was
annoyed by the current system of how bugs are closed and proposed a
change. Bug reports referring to bugs in testing or stable will be
automatically closed when a new package was uploaded into unstable, even
though the bug still exists in stable and testing. Alfie proposed a stronger connection
between the Bug Tracking System and the testing scripts and offered
his assistance.

Problems with Testing Migration? Michael Meskes noticed
that packages don't seem to make it into the testing distribution currently
and wondered if there are any serious problems. Anthony Towns explained
that the glibc package in unstable has release critical bugs assigned against
it, which keeps it out of testing, which in turn keeps other packages from
entering testing, if they depend on glibc.

Debian Developer Packages Overview. Igor Genibel announced
the new interface
to the packages overview system. It is meant to combine links to all
information that is relevant for a package maintainer. The interface helps a
maintainer to keep track of what is going on with their packages with a
particular focus on dependencies and porting issues. At one time it was discussed
start my.debian.org for such purpose.

Free TrueType Fonts? Michael Cardenas wondered
how to continue to be able to distribute more free fonts (other than dustismo
and metatype). He came across a list of original
font authors and contacted some
of them. Simon Law pointed at the freefont effort and the
ttfmod utility for
creating and modifying TrueType hinting. Additionally, Peter Novodvorsky
(Петр
Новодворский)
pointed at fonts that were converted
from GPLed URW PostScript fonts with manual rehinting done and cyrillic glyphs
added, and Brian Carlson added links
to public domain fonts.

Is Apsfilter non-free? Ville Muikkula stomped
over potential postcardware in the apsfilter package. The license, though, looks more
like a "should" and not a "must", which should be fine. However, in order to
solve this issue Osamu Aoki (青木 修)
contacted
the author.

Customizing Applications for a common Look. Erich Schubert
wondered
whether Debian should create and distribute a nice Debian theme for KDE and
GNOME, like other distributors do. Yenar Calentaure added that
every other major distribution has its own look, Debian can differentiate from
them by sticking with the upstream look and proposed providing Debian
wallpaper, logos and icons.

Debian based CD based Distributions. Dale Scheetz reported
about two distributions that are based on Debian and run directly from CD.
Dale says that it appears that Debian is finally being used in the ways that
the project had been wishing for since before Bruce Perens was project leader.
Dale includes a report about Knoppix from a German development group and Demolinux from a French development
group.

Uploading more than one Architecture. Dale Scheetz pondered
whether it would be useful and helpful to upload packages for more than one
architecture in parallel with the source. Ryan Murray explained
that it won't speed up the build process a lot since build daemons pick up new
packages once they're accepted by the archive. However, it could be even
worse if the maintainer misses an architecture-specific transition and the
package requires a binary-only upload for the particular architecture.

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure
that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

Orphaned Packages. 6 packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 117 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the WNPP pages for
the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA:
if you plan to take over a package.

Seen something interesting? Please drop us a note whenever
you see something noteworthy that you think is appropriate for inclusion in
DWN. We don't notice everything, unfortunately. Of course, we are also
thankful for completely written items from volunteer writers. Please see the
contributing page. We're
looking forward to receiving your mail at dwn@debian.org.